Category: viz

To celebrate 25 years of Linux kernel development, we at Bitergia have produced the Linux development history dashboard. This dashboard visualizes the current Linux git repository from two points of view: the history of all commits (changes to the source code) up to now, and the history of all lines in the current version. The dashboard visualizes the main parameters about the development (the who, when and what) are visualized, and allows for drilling down in the data, for example finding the specific commits that lead to a specific part of the code.

Do you want to learn about when the lines in the current kernel were authored? Who has participated in specific areas of the kernel? How many files have remain untouched for more than 10 years? Play with the dashboard and find your own interesting details!

The dashboard was produced using only free, open source software tools (among them, GrimoireLab, our tookit for software development analytics). If you want to learn more details, check the slides I intended to use for my presentation at LinuxCon, which unfortunately I couldn’t attend. Those provide some more insight about how it was produced, some examples about how it can be used, and some curiosities found by exploring it.

In a large free, open source software development community, not all developers are equal. Some are more experienced, some are better known, some know better how to adhere to the uses and customs of the project, some write code that is more easily accepted by others. One of the areas where these differences are more noticeable is the code review process. It is not equally easy for all developers to push their patches through code review. Even when the process itself tries to be fair and unbiased, well, “all developers are equal, but some are more equal than others”.

Fortunately, we have plenty of data in the code review system. We can use analytics on that data to learn about how difficult it is for developers to get their patches accepted. We will use a OpenStack code review dashboard, composed with data from the OpenStack Gerrit instance to illustrate the process.

Where do the developers in my FOSS community live? For large open source communities where personal contact with developers is impossible, answering this simple question may be difficult. Fortunately, a simple technique, time zone analysis, can be used on git and mailing list repositories to at least partially answer this question. Read our blog post “Using Git and mailing lists time zones to find out where developers live” in OpenSource.com to learn more about it.

This dashboard includes information about all review processes (changesets) in OpenStack, using information obtained from their Gerrit instance. For each review, we have information such as the submitter (owner), the time it was first uploaded and accepted or abandoned, the number of patchsets (iterations) needed until it was accepted, and the time until it was merged or abandoned. With all of them we have prepared an active visualization that allows both to understand the big picture and to drill down looking for the details. Follow on reading to learn about some of these details.

[Note: this is our second post about our dashboards based on Kibana. If you’re interested, have a look at the first one, about OpenStack code contributions.]

One of the nice things that these new dashboards allow is the level of filtering and drill down which is possible. For example, in the above dashboard, it is possible to click on any sector on a pie chart, on any entry of a table, on any bar in a bar chart, and the corresponding filter will act. This allows for obtaining specialized dashboards very easily, such as this one with the contributions by RedHat (produced by clicking on RedHat in the list of of top organizations, or the contributions to Liberty, the latest release cycle of OpenStack, by selecting the corresponding period (last bar) in the “OpenStack ten top organizations by release” chart.

If you’re interested in learning about some tips and tricks about what can be done with these dashboards, follow on reading…

Starting this July, Bitergia is working with the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) to analyze their free software projects and related communities. This includes MediaWiki, the software that makes Wikipedia possible. A first (still pre-beta) version of a development dashboard for these projects is already available at Wikimedia Labs. During the next weeks, it will be improved to show detailed information about the most relevant metrics for Wikimedia communities and development processes, and their evolution over time.

Wikimedia development dashboard

The WMF is a nonprofit charitable organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual, educational content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. The WMF operates some of the largest collaborative projects worldwide, including Wikipedia.

On 11st April Bitergia participated in LGM 2013 presenting the status of VizGrimoireJS, our platform for visualizing metrics.

The hot issue was to use HTML5 Canvas or SVG to create the visualizations. And the key to answer this questions is, are the visualizations going to be edited by other tools? Then, use SVG. If not, the two technologies have pros and cons. Right now, VizGrimoireJS is using the cool Flotr2 library and D3 for some specific graphs, like Treemap. Check it in our live preview.

Bitergia, the software development analytics company

Bitergia is focused on software development analytics. We aim to produce useful information about how software projects are performing, how different actors are contributing and how they could be improved.

We provide tools and means to track all these aspects, and to evaluate how policies and decisions are shaping the development processes.